(1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the fabrication of integrated circuit devices, and more particularly, to a method and structure for a new contact that connects an active area with a polysilicon interconnection.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
Conventional methods of forming CMOS gate electrodes in or over an active device region of a semiconductor substrate are well known in the art. The active device region is typically defined by field oxide regions, which electrically isolate the active region of the substrate from the surrounding surface areas of the substrate. Substrate conductivity in the active surface area is first established by providing n/p-well impurity implants into the active surface of the substrate. In fabricating a CMOS device, a layer of gate material such as polysilicon is formed over a layer of thin oxide that is formed over the active device region of the substrate. The polysilicon layer is then masked and both the exposed polysilicon and the underlying thin layer of oxide are etched to define a poly-silicon gate electrode that is separated from the substrate by the thin layer of gate oxide. Two masked steps for N-LDD and for P-LDD dopants are adopted to form lightly doped diffusion (LDD) source/drain regions in the substrate as a first phase of forming the substrate N-type source/drain regions of the CMOS device. After the formation of for instance oxide sidewall spacers over the sidewalls of the polysilicon gate and of the gate oxide, a second N-type and p-type impurity implant is performed to set the conductivity of the gate region to a desired level and to complete the N+ and P+ source/drain regions of the gate electrode.
Contact surfaces of the gate electrode may then be salicided by depositing for instance a layer of titanium or cobalt or nickel over the structure, more specifically over the exposed surfaces of the N+ and P+ source/drain regions and the gate region. The deposited titanium or cobalt or nickel is annealed, thereby causing the titanium to react with the underlying N+ and P+ silicon of the substrate of the source/drain regions and the doped polysilicon gate to form titanium salicide over these surfaces.
The gate electrode is completed by forming a layer of dielectric material, typically silicon oxide, over the gate electrode. Contact openings are etched in the dielectric and a metallization layer is formed to provide contacts to the salicided surfaces of the source/drain regions and over the polysilicon gate.
For maximum density to be achieved in a six-transistor SRAM device, the cells of the device must be created in as small a surface area as possible. A shared contact is therefore provided to simultaneously connect the gate and the active region of the cells, this contact is referred to as the butted or butt contact or the coupled contact or the shared contact. This approach however presents a challenge since the processing steps required to create the butt contact must simultaneously expose both a standard square contact and the butt contact. This results in a very difficult etch step, caused by differences in contact size, contact shape and fluctuations in the thickness of the etch stop layer that has been deposited over a polysilicon pattern of varying density. This may, under worst case circumstances, result in increased junction leakage, primarily caused by the etch for creation of the butt contact proceeding through the etch stop layer over the gate spacer causing excessive loss of the created gate electrode spacers. An additional concern is errors of miss-alignment between the butt contact and the polysilicon or between the butt contact and other critical points of electrical contact of the created SRAM device. The invention addresses these concerns of the creation of the butt contact.                U.S. Pat. No. 6,310,397 B1 (Chang et al.) shows a butt contact process in a SRAM.        U.S. Pat. No. 6,239,458 B1 (Liaw et al.) reveals a butt contact process.        U.S. Pat. No. 6,121,684 (Liaw) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,057,186 (Change et al.) reveal other butt contact methods.        